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> what’s the bear thesis here? Nvidia is ceding the low-end GPU market to anyone who wants it. Not only does it allow a competitor to establish a reliable sou

> what’s the bear thesis here? Nvidia is ceding the low-end GPU market to anyone who wants it. Not only does it allow a competitor to establish a reliable source of revenue for their R&D department, but it could cut off the sale of the binned chips that are inevitably produced on the expensive, tiny processes that Nvidia uses - which would hurt their margins to some degree.

jauntywundrkind 3y ago
Innovators Dilemma seems strong on this one. Except typically the flight upmarket is driven by competition below. In this case Nvidia isn't being driven upmarket, the profits are just too tempting focusing on upmarket & there's not much competition downmarket.
paulmd 3y ago
"obviously chevy is just ceding the low-end market to anyone willing to make a camaro for the price of a camry, just think of all the profit waiting for anyone willing to establish themselves in this market" bro there is like $10 of margin in your idea for a $200 gpu lol, nobody is "ceding" anything (actually 4060 is a more advanced card than 7600 on literally every front, for ~10% more money) but the cost floor has climbed to the point where $200-300 gpus just don't progress that much anymore. There's very good reasons for this - shrinks are the least effective on low-tier cards (because memory controllers don't shrink), and you simply don't gain much actual savings from shrinking a 200mm2 die - congrats it's 150mm2 now, on a more expensive node, meaning your $10 chip is now $9. And meanwhile gamers want more VRAM every year, manufacturing and testing and shipping costs have gone up (and cost the same for a 4090 as a 4060), etc. The economics of low-end cards is literally terrible and they are simply falling off the edge of profitability. Intel is willing to lose money hand-over-fist just to get into the market, but AMD and NVIDIA are pretty much charging fair-ish prices, and gamers just are too emotionally immature to accept that moore's law really really actually is dead for realsies and things aren't going to progress 40% perf/$ per gen anymore. It's so weird, nobody cries about the CPU market like this. A 1600AF went for $85, a 3600 went for $160, nobody said "boo" when the 5600X increased that to $330 or whatever. Nowadays you are spending at least 50% more on your CPU than you did 5 years ago, sometimes closer to 2x. The enthusiast market is buying $250-400 cpus now, not $85-160. And obviously everyone understands that upgrading your CPU every gen is terrible value too, especially when prices have drifted upwards. But they don't have a half-decade of negging from reviewers telling them that this is a market in crisis, and that they should feel bad about buying a CPU, etc. The literal half-decade of warfare from reviewers against the GPU market is so tired at this point. Bro, things are going to slow down, it just is how it is. GPUs are the processor that's most dependent on moore's law providing growth in transistors at the same cost, and wafer price increases hit them the hardest. Go complain to TSMC instead, or ASML, or the brick wall - it's ultimately a physics problem. But there's a hell of a lot of clicks and youtube ad money to be made whining about it in the meantime. At least reviewers are finally coming to jesus on DLSS - mostly because they know AMD will finally have a decent upscaler within a year tops, and that RDNA4/5 will be pushing forward on tensor etc. The writing was on the wall as soon the specs leaked for PS5 Pro, which is basically adopting RTX features wholesale. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbJYtixMUgI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbJYtixMUgI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BG-7vyw2YRg&t=1625s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BG-7vyw2YRg&t=1625s

jauntywundrkind 3y ago

Innovators Dilemma seems strong on this one. Except typically the flight upmarket is driven by competition below. In this case Nvidia isn't being driven upmarket, the profits are just too tempting focusing on upmarket & there's not much competition downmarket.

paulmd 3y ago

"obviously chevy is just ceding the low-end market to anyone willing to make a camaro for the price of a camry, just think of all the profit waiting for anyone willing to establish themselves in this market" bro there is like $10 of margin in your idea for a $200 gpu lol, nobody is "ceding" anything (actually 4060 is a more advanced card than 7600 on literally every front, for ~10% more money) but the cost floor has climbed to the point where $200-300 gpus just don't progress that much anymore. There's very good reasons for this - shrinks are the least effective on low-tier cards (because memory controllers don't shrink), and you simply don't gain much actual savings from shrinking a 200mm2 die - congrats it's 150mm2 now, on a more expensive node, meaning your $10 chip is now $9. And meanwhile gamers want more VRAM every year, manufacturing and testing and shipping costs have gone up (and cost the same for a 4090 as a 4060), etc. The economics of low-end cards is literally terrible and they are simply falling off the edge of profitability. Intel is willing to lose money hand-over-fist just to get into the market, but AMD and NVIDIA are pretty much charging fair-ish prices, and gamers just are too emotionally immature to accept that moore's law really really actually is dead for realsies and things aren't going to progress 40% perf/$ per gen anymore. It's so weird, nobody cries about the CPU market like this. A 1600AF went for $85, a 3600 went for $160, nobody said "boo" when the 5600X increased that to $330 or whatever. Nowadays you are spending at least 50% more on your CPU than you did 5 years ago, sometimes closer to 2x. The enthusiast market is buying $250-400 cpus now, not $85-160. And obviously everyone understands that upgrading your CPU every gen is terrible value too, especially when prices have drifted upwards. But they don't have a half-decade of negging from reviewers telling them that this is a market in crisis, and that they should feel bad about buying a CPU, etc. The literal half-decade of warfare from reviewers against the GPU market is so tired at this point. Bro, things are going to slow down, it just is how it is. GPUs are the processor that's most dependent on moore's law providing growth in transistors at the same cost, and wafer price increases hit them the hardest. Go complain to TSMC instead, or ASML, or the brick wall - it's ultimately a physics problem. But there's a hell of a lot of clicks and youtube ad money to be made whining about it in the meantime. At least reviewers are finally coming to jesus on DLSS - mostly because they know AMD will finally have a decent upscaler within a year tops, and that RDNA4/5 will be pushing forward on tensor etc. The writing was on the wall as soon the specs leaked for PS5 Pro, which is basically adopting RTX features wholesale. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbJYtixMUgI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbJYtixMUgI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BG-7vyw2YRg&t=1625s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BG-7vyw2YRg&t=1625s